From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Thu Jan 16 17:20:13 EST 1992
Article 2693 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Semantics of thoughts
Keywords: searle,consciousness,semantics
Message-ID: <369@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jan 92 23:04:32 GMT
References: <1991Dec8.192843.6951@psych.toronto.edu> <1991Dec11.170157.27053@cs.yale.edu> <5912@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan13.023843.12181@cs.yale.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 39

In article <1992Jan13.023843.12181@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:
|Sorry to be so confusing.  The contrast I'm trying to draw is this:
|Let me adopt the term "semantophile" instead of "Searlite."  I mean a
|person who feels that it is important that we consciously "grasp the
|meanings" of the symbols we use.  (There's at least one: Exhibit A:
|Mikhail Zeleny.)  Both semantophiles and computationalists agree that
|semantics is possible, but only the former require that semantics play
|some kind of active, continuous, functional role in the use of
|symbols.  ...

This sounds like they are asking for the symbol to have some sort of internal
structure that is relevant to how it is processed.

I see no problem with this, each symbol can be treated as a composition of
other symbolic systems, ultimately leading down to the internal representation
of the raw input data (which acts as the structure of the atomic symbols).

If this is not what is meant not, what is meant by 'grasp the meaning of'?
and by 'active, continuous, functional role'?

|Example: Suppose we discover that frogs employ a symbol type that they
|instantiate tokens of whenever a fly is around.  Actually, 5% of the
|time a token is mistakenly generated by a passing seedpod or jet
|plane.  Still, we would have good reasons to say that the symbol
|"means" fly to the frog.  But I'm speaking as a computationalist here;
|a semantophile would have trouble with the belief that any symbols
|mean anything to a frog, because they can't imagine the frog "grasping
|the meaning" of a symbol.

So, just because they cannot imagine it they reject it?

The real problem boils down to what is meant by 'grasp the meaning of'?
If it cannot be put in operational terms, making it measurable, it seems
to me to be mere philosophical mumbo-jumbo - with no real value outside
of a closed philosophical system.
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



